That colored ls is in your profile, .bash_profile if you took the defaults, or possibly .bashrc. You can always turn it off with ls --color=no.
As for me, I find they can be convenient, but not that green they use for executables, so I change that. I believe you copy /etc/DIR_COLORS to your $HOME directory, and then you can mess around with it. in a typical 24 line xterm, doing pgedown twice should get you to the part you'd want to change. Oh, in your $HOME directory, you call .dir_colors

Seriously, I believe BSD has options for it--yup, in FreeBSD it's ls -G. It can be handy if you're in a hurry, I just don't like the default colors, at least in RH based systems.

I *think* (I don't know about Solaris) that it's actually an option and some flavors of Linux put in the skel files. Yup, I see that it's an alias put in by default. If you type alias you'll see it. So unset it in the .bash_profile or .bashrc. (Assuming you haven't changed the default shell.)

The problem with the default colors with most of the GNU tools is that they only work on a black background, on a white background some text is unreadable.
And the default background color of xterm is white (Except on Linux ofcourse, where "distro developers" feel the need to change the defaults for 3rd party software...)

GNU ls has the "--color" option, which is the same as the -G option on FreeBSD ... Maybe some systems enable it by default through some alias or something? (Messing with defaults again ... *sigh*)

The colors on BSD work well on both a white and black background, although I'm not sure if this is by design or accidental...

Anyway, I don't know if linux is getting worse ... But I do know these threads/rants are getting worse

__________________
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.

nvi.
Slackware and Debian use elvis, most others use vim. RH has vim-enhanced and vim-minimal.
As for bin/sh and POSIX, I'm not sure it's always the case. When I'm ensuring that something is portable, I either ssh into my BSD machine or use dash, created by Debian, I think but avaiable for others, which seems to be closest to sh. For instance sh (in Linux) will support $UID (which is like id -u, gives the UID number) which can mess you up if the script is also going to be used on AIX.

As for me, after the job change, I figured I could either moan about it every day, or get used to it. I'm happier getting used to it.

It's nice to be able to type yum -y update and walk away. (On CentOS, made for the enterprise, not on Fedora--on Fedora, that's like doing portupgrade -a and walking away--you might get away with it and you might not.)

My biggest complaint about RH systems is how Gnome-centric they are--for example, several things, including sound, are tied to ConsoleKit which is a Gnome-ish thing.

I believe vi on FreeBSD is nvi. It really pisses of my vim-loving co-worker that he can't get vim to work the same on FreeBSD as on Linux, and that he can't figure his way around nvi. I just tell him to use ee.

The thing that *really* pisses me off about Linux, though, is the horrible kludges and hacks they have for network configuration. ifconfig for the phsyical wired interfaces, wiconfig for wireless interfaces, wpa_supplicant if you need WPA, brctl for bridged interfaces, tunctl for tun/tap devices, something else for vlan devices, something else for link aggregation, and so on and so on. It's a friggin' mess, to say the least. And if you do things in the wrong order, it can be a royal pain to untangle. Debian at least tries to hide the mess via ifupdown and /etc/network/interfaces, but even that isn't all roses.

Coming from FreeBSD where ifconfig is used to configure network interfaces, and where /etc/rc.conf handles things for boot, trying to do anything beyond "dhclient eth0" on Linux is enough to make you go grey or bald.

I agree with corey_jones on the colorization as I am an old amber (dos) guy an woul rather see casesensitive directory name lke on ye old 16bit doss, my main petpeve with Solaris is lack ox a editor such as pico or nano as they are my two favorite opensourc command lline editors, because the closely emulate the old edit program from IBM dos. Unfortunately nothing I have trued will make them play nicely with Solaris?

__________________ Google Linux is a Green Horns Best Friend (GHBF).
Windows = a 32 bit extensions to a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a four bit processor written by 2-bit monopolistic software company founded by a .3-bit Harvard Drop out, who can't stand one respectable bit of competition.
If I believe something to be immoral a will not keep quite and let my voice of annoyance be heard loud and clear.